


Decree

by svecounia



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magical Girls, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-08
Updated: 2015-10-08
Packaged: 2018-04-25 09:41:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4955488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/svecounia/pseuds/svecounia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Vuvalini women preserve their way of life with wishes, one apiece, with the power to protect or revolutionize. Furiosa, wrenched from her home and convinced she's bereft of her birthright, despairs until she finds a cause she's willing to give her life for. A vague magical girl AU in a canon setting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Decree

Furiosa's mother wore a ring on her left hand. It wasn't there before Furiosa was born, her mother told her, but she found it there not two days later as though it had been there the whole time. It had a tiny, blood red gem that glinted in the sun, burning bright as Mary's hair when it whipped in the desert wind. 

"One day you'll have your own," her mother promised her. "All Vuvalini women do. It is our birthright."

"Yours will be beautiful." Her father kissed her forehead, hefting his pack to rest more comfortably on his shoulders. "Hammered gold beaten out from sunshine, just like you."

Furiosa didn't see him again after that, but that was the way men were. Often they went out exploring, beyond their broad swatch of green and into the wasteland, and never returned. "Who can tame the heart of a man?" Katie often said with a laugh. "They see the world, but we have our wishes. Which would you rather have?"

"Wishes!" Furiosa and Valkyrie always chorused back, grinning at each other excitedly. What color will yours be? They asked each other all the time. Valkyrie changed her mind a lot: red, orange, violet. "Really, really dark blue," was her usual answer though, and she threw her face to the sky as though imagining the inky darkness of night. "Almost black."

"Mine will be blue too!" Furiosa wriggled excitedly. "But bright and clear, like water."

But there was no telling when the ring would appear – only when it came time to make their wish, and no one would tell them when that would be. Furiosa tried to force it many times, squeezing her eyes shut and hunching her shoulders in concentration, but her mother laughed.

"No, it's not like that. You'll know when it's time."

Furiosa was equal parts frustrated and relieved. She wanted it now, but she was afraid of making the wrong choice. Wishes didn't come free, and the payment came very late, sometimes years and years later. 

"Vuvalini can revolutionize this world, Furiosa," Katie told her by the fireside on the night of her initiation, long after most everyone had gone to bed or to guard duty and left the two alone. "It's how we have endured for so long. Selfless women give their lives to protect what we have, and to protect each other. All we have to do is will it into existence." She turned to face Furiosa, the lines in her skin thrown into sharp relief by the flickering fire. "What is so important to you that you would give your life for it?" She considered for a bit, then smiled. "I can see it in you. Yours will be very great indeed."

Mary's payment came soon after as their home burned. The Green Place had been charred, black, ringed with smoldering orange, overrun by men from the wasteland. At first she thought her father might have come back and brought all the Vuvalini men with him, but her father wouldn't have set fire to the trees and the crops. He wouldn't have brought great hoses to suck up all their water, he wouldn't have wrenched her out of Valkyrie's arms and carried her away. Furiosa kept her eyes wide open even as the smoke choked her, screaming and biting and struggling until she was shoved into the hatch and the door was slammed shut. Her mother's arms found her in the darkness, clinging and slicked with blood.

"My Furiosa, my Furiosa," she rasped. 

They were in the belly of the rig for two days, no food, no light, no water, then dragged out and shoved into a clammy cell. Her mother's voice had gone weak, she spoke very rarely, and Furiosa could do nothing more than shiver against her, useless. Men in white paint stalked by the cell door like dogs, growling and baring their teeth. Mary found the strength to hiss back.

The third day saw her weaker than ever. She smiled in the filtered light of the cell and told Furiosa to get some rest, leaning Furiosa's head against her chest as though she were still a child. Darkness had folded around them by the time the men returned, and Furiosa couldn't see them, just hear their heavy boots on the stone floors. Her stomach clenched.

"The contract stands," Mary barked out harshly in a tone Furiosa had never heard before, and she startled, her thoughts scattered. The men's hands froze on the cell door. "Take your payment, grant my wish. _Protect her."_

A gale of howling wind filled the hall and rushed into the cell. Furiosa could feel her mother tense against her and Furiosa struggled to her knees, trying desperately to take hold of her mother's shoulders to steady her, but the wind was dragging her away. It filled her lungs and choked her, deafened her ears, ripped the voice from her lungs as she tried to call out—

Furiosa came to hours later. The men outside the cell door were lying still. Her mother was dead beside her, the blood-colored gem on her ring cracked and discolored.

Furiosa was a Vuvalini no longer. She was a wife of the Immortan Joe, wrapped in white, enclosed by a shining silver door. Perfect. Protected. Not the way her mother had hoped. He came monthly and took her roughly by the wrist. Her sisters comforted her afterwards. "I am protected," she whispered to herself at night, fingers fisted in the sheets of her head, face pressed into the pillow so her sisters wouldn't hear her uneven breathing, so she didn't feel the hot course of tears down her cheeks again, so her mother's wish didn't go ungranted. "I am protected."

She didn't feel protected. 

Her third strike came early and bloody, just like the two before it. She clung to Miss Giddy and to her sisters and sobbed and sobbed. "Nothing takes hold," she choked out. "He's made me sharp and ruined inside." She had feared bearing the Immortan's child, but she feared joining the Wretched more, and she had already seen two sisters cast down since she arrived. Now she would join them.

She struck a bargain instead. Too tough to bear children, but tough enough to lead an army. He laughed in her face, his breath warm and rotting. "If you can survive."

Furiosa was a Vuvalini no longer. Separated from her home. A failed mother. An object used and discarded. The wish she had dreamed of and yearned for with Valkyrie felt like it belonged to someone else entirely, surely that hadn't been her beside the fire with Katie just two thousand days ago. It was no doubt forfeit, meant for better women, women who remembered their homes and protected their kind, like her mother. 

As she clutched her only belongings to her chest – a pair of heavy mismatched boots and black cargo pants – she squeezed her eyes shut and hunched her shoulders.

_"I wish for survival."_

She awoke the next day surrounded by leering war boys, ghoulish faces grinning wide and leaning into her bunk. They'd never seen a woman among them before, nor had they seen anything like the gold ring on her left hand, a blue gem set in the middle, bright and clear like water.

She raced across the wasteland in the years that followed, first on a bike, then a pursuit vehicle, and finally a war rig. She bore Joe's paint like a war boy, but her Vuvalini birthright shined bright in the sun and she felt the wings of her mother's protection carrying her onward. Only her mother's wish could have granted her this: the courage to demand a better lot from the Immortan, the strength to endure the war that followed. A Vuvalini no longer? No, the proof glinted defiantly on her hand.

Some years later, the ring was gone. Her left arm was gone as well, but the loss of the ring pierced her much more deeply than mere loss of limb ever could. Ace had pulled her from the burning wreck: the car was salvaged, the arm was not. Probably digesting in the belly of some wasteland dingo by now, ring included. Furiosa took weeks to recover, lingering in the barracks long after she'd been deemed "fit enough" by Organic.

But she survived. In fact, she was awarded for her valor with an Imperator title and, later, a replacement arm. Gunmetal gray, heavy, clanking. She would have hated it if it wasn't proof that her mother's wish lived on, and perhaps her own as well.

She watched over the new wives of the Immortan with steely eyes. To speak with them, to even look at them, was to reawaken a gutting misery and tearing agony, so she did neither for a very long time. Protection. Survival. Here were five women who were guaranteed neither, and here was she, sitting uselessly with both in droves, magically bestowed upon her by her heritage. Why had she asked for survival when her mother had already guaranteed it? Could there be a more selfish wish than to remove yourself from the burden of paying its price? She had been foolish, squandered the one scrap of culture left to her. The thought revolted her. 

Miss Giddy knew Furiosa's moods and when it was safest to approach. When Furiosa might be able to respond with more than a grunt and a nod. She remembered from Furiosa's days in the vault, though she assured Furiosa she hadn't shared that detail with the wives, for which Furiosa was grateful.

"Angharad plots an escape," she told her one day after the wives had made for bed and Furiosa was about to leave.

"An escape." Furiosa repeated the words with disdain, snorting bitterly. 

"You did it."

"Did I?" She countered, brandishing her metal arm. "I don't think the Dag has the makings of an Imperator."

"Then deliver them somewhere where the word Imperator has no meaning," Miss Giddy pressed. Furiosa stalked from the vault that night in a huff, heart hammering in her chest, and didn't speak at all for the next several visits.

Protect what we have, and protect each other. Fine words for Katie, who had practically an entire lifetime with her initiate mother and even longer in the Green Place, whereas Furiosa had only a few weeks with the first and a few years with the second. Fine words for the wives too, who looked at her with pleading expressions that cut her straight to the bone, who had never shot apart someone's skull or squeezed the life from someone's throat. Who were dragged away by the wrist just as she had been thousands of days before. 

What was so important to her that she would give her life for it?

Thinking back, she hadn't asked for her own survival, just _survival,_ plain and simple. There was no telling where her mother's wish ended and her own began. The two were linked, related, mother and daughter.

It was more than a gamble, she acknowledged as she readied the rig under the cover of darkness. It wasn't just her own life on the line as she guided the women through the service tunnels, a long, circuitous route that took nearly half an hour to navigate but ensured no one would find them. Without her ring, there wasn't even a guarantee that her wish had any life in it. Angharad embraced her before she climbed aboard, holding her tightly by the shoulders, and Furiosa swallowed hard before shooing her inside. She did one last check, then snuck her way back through the tunnels, reaching deep past the scar tissue of painful memories for the words her mother had spoken on her behalf seven thousand days ago. 

"The contract stands. _Ensure their survival."_

**Author's Note:**

> This began as a Puella Magi Madoka Magica crossover because I am convinced every one of the women in this movie fulfilled its criteria for potential magical girls, but I couldn't bear to explain Kyuubey in-universe. Instead we get pseudo-soul gems and a dubious exchange of a life for a wish. Maybe Angharad had a wish of her own, that she'd pay the price of anyone else's sacrifice...


End file.
